>> > Just be aware that you might not see a dramatic increase in speed just > moving Bacula itself! > > If you are using VMWare with VMDK files on a VMFS volume you need to be > aware that any IO by a guest requires a reservation of the entire VMFS > volume. Locking is happening at the SCSI layer - if one guest wants to > read one byte of data nobody else can do anything until its IO operation > is complete. Remembering that you probably are only going to get around > 75 IOPs you can see how a VMFS volume with more than a handful of > virtual machines on it can very quickly end up performing very poorly, > especially with spinning rust underneath it. A good RAID card with a > LOT of cache memory can help with overall system performance, but > backups by definition are going to be touching lots of areas of data > that aren't likely to be in cache. > > What I'm getting at is you might actually need to focus your efforts and > dollars on the storage underneath your VMs before you do too much with > your backup system. A great big nice happy dedicated Bacula server > would be nice, but if the VMs are still IOP constrained ESPECIALLY if > they are actively in use while being backed up you probably won't see > that much of an improvement. > > An easy way to validate this would be to ensure you have attribute > spooling turned on and to set up the attribute spooling to write to your > NAS rather than to local storage. That will get the VM storage > infrastructure out of your backup pathway. > > Bryn
This has been a fantastic education. Thanks. I’ll recommend to the client that their IO is slow.. and I’ll get told “Oh! It seems fine to us!” :) I googled and found documentation about turning on Data Spooling, but not indepnedantly turning on Attribute Spooling. Could you point me at that please.. ( I know I Know.. I’ll keep looking :) ) Jeff.
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